House hopeful Gray canvasses in Seaside

“In all due modesty, I’m pretty well-qualified, both by education and experience,” Gray said. “But running without party backing imposes some challenges. You might say I’ve been building this airplane while I fly it.”

Gray, 71, grew up in a political family in Virginia, where his father Frederick Thomas Gray was a legislator and served as state attorney general in the early 1960s.

Rick Gray attended the University of Virginia and went to law school. After receiving his master’s degree, he worked with his father for three years in the Legislature, taught and practiced law. He served as secretary to the Commonwealth from 1979 to 1981, resigning in 1981 in solidarity with striking air traffic controllers.

In Virginia, Gray taught history at Midlothian High School in Chesterfield County, William Monroe High School in Greene County and the Appomattox Regional Governor’s School in Petersburg.

After several years of caring for his mother, he turned to the West Coast following her death in 2011.

“My best friend had a two-bedroom apartment,” he said. “She was getting over a divorce. She said I should come to Cannon Beach because it’s a healing place. The rest is history.”

He hopes his experience in Virginia will translate to Oregon.

He bypassed a run at city government, which, he said, typically leads to “a bias toward consensus. Nobody wants to step too far outside the circle.”

He sees himself as a dissenting voice.

“A legislature I understand,” Gray said. “I’ve been around them and legislatures start with a combat and work toward compromise. But in the process, a lot of times, you do get to explore ideas, amendments — there’s ways to shape proposals into something that makes sense.”

Gray describes himself as “a moderately progressive Republican” of the type popularized by former U.S. Sen. John Warner, a Virginia Republican whose campaign he worked on.

“I thought he was likable,” Gray said. “I also liked his approach to things.”

He said education was at the top of his agenda, with a need for funding at all levels and additional assistance for students.

“One of the things I learned when I was teaching, all around the country there are way too many kids who have spent five or six years before they graduated from college,” he said. “It doesn’t bother the college if they have to stay an extra year, because they get another year’s worth of money. It really increases the cost of education. That’s another year you’re paying out and you’re not starting to earn it. We should really do an audit of that.”

In fighting homelessness, Gray said there is a tendency to push people along. Oregon could learn from other states and cities, citing Houston and Salt Lake City as examples of positive results.